October 21, 2016

DON'T YOU FORGET ABOUT ME

by Liz Tipping

Carina

Review by Pat Black

Liz Tipping’s second novel Don't You Forget About Me is a
girl-gets-together-with-boy affair, so you can expect a spot of the warm
fuzzies. You can’t assume a happy ending in anything these days, though, and it
wouldn’t be a love story if the course ran smooth. I think someone once said
something about that - Nik Kershaw or Howard Jones, I forget. All in all it’s a
lovely cup of hot chocolate before you head to bed.

The title alludes to Simple Minds, and by
extension the John Hughes teen movies of the 1980s. Cara, the narrator, is more
of a child of the nineties, but this means she was weaned on the classic home
video rentals of the decade before. This was when Pretty In Pink and The
Breakfast Club ruled the roost, and Cara uses these movies as a comfort
blanket whenever her life hasn’t gone to plan. And in general, it hasn’t.

Cara has stuck it out in one of the few
remaining Blockbuster branches in the country, a symbol of an industry which
technological progress has rendered redundant. Cara is heading for redundancy,
too, as the curtain comes down on the video shop. She is very creative and has
training in events management, but just hasn’t made the leap in her career.
This is a recurring theme for Cara, who seems to have run into something of a
roadblock in her schooldays. When she recalls these times, this is where the
novel got really interesting for me.

It was a reminder of how tough your
teenage years can be at school. There’s the paranoia of your clothing, your
hairstyle, and being constantly judged over them; and then there’s the type of
bullying which isn’t quite as bad as a punch in the chops, but can leave a much
nastier wound which turns into a lifelong scar. Cruel nicknames, for instance –
Cara is known as “the bag lady” by her school year’s alpha bitch and her
cohorts, owing to some insalubrious accessorising, so the name sticks. There’s
also the bitching and whispering campaigns, which can blight the boys as well
as the girls.

Remember also, if you can bear it, when
you were the aggressor. You’ll call to mind the silly things you might have
said about a person for a laugh, which can be intensely hurtful. I spoke to one
old school friend recently who reminded me that I’d once called this harmless
lad who had big ears “20,000 Lugs Under The Sea” before swimming practice. My
mate actually congratulated me for this piece of patter which he’d remembered
for a quarter of a century. Like it was something I should be given a handshake
or a slap on the back for.

I was mortified by this memory of my own
demoniacal cruelty, that needless nastiness of youth. That guy might still
harbour a grudge, and I wouldn’t blame him if he did. One dark night he might
kick my front door in and seek revenge, his gigantic ears unfurling like some
kung-fu Dumbo.

But my teenage guilt aside, Liz Tipping
gets this stuff absolutely right. Cara suffers in the present day for what’s
gone on in the past. It tends to linger once the school gates clang shut behind
you for the last time. This gives her novel and her main character lovely
texture, and we invest a great deal of sympathy in her.

Cara is looking for her Moment. Like at
the end of Pretty In Pink, when Molly
Ringwald dazzles in the spotlight at last, or when Ally Sheedy and Judd Nelson
kiss in the car park in The Breakfast
Club. Cue Simple Minds; and credits.

She gets her chance – there’s going to be
a school reunion, attended not only by her schoolyard nemesis who christened
her “the bag lady”, but also Daniel Rose, her teenage unrequited love, the lad
she adored but who didn’t give her a second glance.

Cara’s teenage crush has aged very
well, it seems... but she’s done not too badly either, judging by his reaction
to her when he meets her in the street.

Cara decides she wants to right some
wrongs. But she’ll need some help, not least from her workmate in the video
shop, and also her best mate, the solid-and-reliable-and-quite-dishy Stubbs.

The course of the plot won’t be a massive
surprise to anyone, but the “courtship” parts, where two people who should
really be together who are chasing different people start to realise they
should really be together, were terrific. There’s a brilliant but frustrating
part where Cara plus a significant other have a smashing day out at the
seaside, winning teddies in the amusements, but they just don’t… they can’t
seem to… “For god’s sake, kiss him!”

By that part I was hooked, and also
horrified – wondering if Tipping would follow Pretty In Pink’s plot, and deny her heroine her true love, in
favour of the shiny boy she was fixated on.

The day at the seaside touches on another
thing I loved about the book. There is no conspicuous consumption in it. Cara
doesn’t have a lot of money, and nor does anyone else she knows. They socialise
at a club where you drink beer from cans, poured into a plastic pint tumbler,
and you mingle easily with the pensioners playing bingo. It had authenticity,
which isn’t the first quality I’d associate with this genre.

One thing which puts me off modern romance
novels is that some still seem to be hooked into consumerism, particularly shopping,
and catching the eye of some rich bloke. (Admittedly this prejudice is based on
my experience of the books an ex used to read in the early noughties – a
different geological era in terms of financial climate.) There’s nothing wrong
with good old fantasy, and I guess we’ve all wished we were rich at some point,
or perhaps that we could spend an evening or two with someone who was. But
Cara’s life and ambitions struck a chord with me. The romance felt truer
because of it – taking pleasure in life’s wee miracles, like fish and chips
shared out of the wrapper on a seafront, or laughter over the silly characters
you run into every day in your working life
(“Have you got Free Willy?”).

The book is never preachy about it, but it
is not concerned with wealth, or the acquisition of it. Cara does have talent,
though, and it is harnessed before the end as she hatches a plan for a pop-up
cinema event which heads for a climax as shiny bright as the school reunion.
Apart from that, Cara lives modestly – she seeks out her showstopping dress and
a certain pink cardigan second hand. It was a fine antidote to the likes of the
Sex and the City girls, who shifted
focus from beautifully acidic analyses of their menfolk to buying piles of shoes
in Dubai – not a crime, of course, but they lost a bit of what people loved
about them in the transition.

And so to the ending… it’s perfect. I
shouldn’t say if Cara ends up with her Ducky, because that didn’t happen to
Molly Ringwald’s character… but all loose ends are tied up with a nice pink
ribbon. Now that’s how you finish a novel. It’s as satisfying as when Popeye Doyle zaps Charnier at the end of The French Connection 2. Cut and print.
No further questions. Cue Simple Minds; and credits.